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Home PACS workstations enable social distancing during COVID-19 pandemic: ARRS

Press releases may be edited for formatting or style | May 21, 2020 Health IT Risk Management
Leesburg, VA, May 21, 2020—Remote reading of imaging studies on home PACS workstations can contribute to social distancing, protect vulnerable radiologists and others in the hospital, and ensure seamless interpretation capabilities in emergency scenarios, according to an open-access article published ahead-of-print by the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR).

“Transitioning from on-site interpretation to remote interpretation requires a careful balancing of hospital and departmental finances, engineering choices, and educational and philosophical workflow issues,” wrote lead author Srini Tridandapani of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which uses iSite (Philips Professional Healthcare) for its PACS.

Financial challenges and engineering choices
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Given the difficulty of funding acquisition in the present environment, several radiologists from Tridandapani’s institution offered computers from their laboratories or offices for redeployment as PACS workstations. “Unfortunately,” Tridandapani et al. acknowledged, “many of the offered computers either did not have the processing or memory capacity to serve as PACS workstations or did not have the requisite connections to support all the peripherals needed.” Moreover, hardware and software standardization for every remote workstation proved essential for efficient remote maintenance. “Ultimately,” the authors continued, “our financial request from hospital administration mainly consisted of support for the hardware VPN (virtual private network) system and the standard display monitors, which we were able to secure within a week after conceptualization of the project.”

Workstation assignments
“Because we did not have the funding to equip all of our radiologists with remote PACS workstations, we had to make difficult choices regarding who would benefit the most from these workstations, and conversely who, if equipped with these workstations, could benefit the department the most,” Tridandapani and colleagues explained. Providing remote reading for emergency radiologists was “the easiest part of this decision,” as they interpret across a spectrum of modalities (radiography, ultrasound, CT, MRI) and organ systems (abdominal, cardiothoracic, musculoskeletal, neuroradiologic). However, to achieve equity between the radiologists assigned remote workstations and those needed for on-site reading, the former may be required to work more shifts than the latter. Due to curtailed outpatient imaging and the higher-quality monitors necessary for Mammography Quality Standards Act certification, workstations were not provided for the mammography section. Nuclear medicine was provided a secondary route for remote access to run its specialized PACS solution.

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